Baumgartner's Bombay

by Anita Desai

  On hot summer afternoons she might push him away and say petulantly, ‘Ach, Hugo, you are sweating – and you never wash your shirts even.’ He only laughed and did not mind, perfectly content to lie on his side of the bed, dozing till they heard the servant boy making tea in the kitchen at five o’clock, when she gave him a fierce kick with her naked foot, hissing ‘Get up – go to the bathroom as if you were there for a wash – Raju must not see.’ But by the casual insolence with which he flung down the tea tray beside them, Raju showed that he had of course seen, and knew. Lotte was terrified. What would Kanti say? What would Kanti do?

  Actually Kanti visited her less and less, kept away by ill health to begin with and then by religion. He worked very little, leaving all his business to his sons, and even if he came to Bombay he spent all his time by the little altar he had set up in one corner of the bedroom, Lotte complained, praying and fasting and observing all the rituals of the Hindu year.

  ‘Repenting his wicked ways?’ Baumgartner asked mischievously, giving Lotte a little nudge as they sat drinking their gimlets in his flat, and Lotte gave his hand an angry smack so that his drink spilt.

  One night, Lotte, very drunk, arrived at his flat and insisted Baumgartner go out with her. She directed the taxi to Julius and Gisi’s flat which they found lit up for a party. Whilst Baumgartner protested, ‘Ach, Lotte, I don’t want to go – please let us go home –’ she dragged him on to the pavement outside their window where she stood screaming, ‘Shanghai Lily, hey! Hey, Shanghai Lily!’ and when he tried to pull her away, turned and hit him. He walked off and left her. Two policemen arrived in a jeep, jumped out, grabbed her by the arms and lifted her into the jeep. She was taken to a police chowki and accused of drunken brawling: it seemed Gisela had telephoned from her flat and complained. At dawn, Baumgartner was rung up and told to come and bail her out. Making her bathe and shower in his flat, then forcing her to eat a bowl of cornflakes and milk, he reproached her for her drunkenness, genuinely shocked by her behaviour.

  ‘Ach, Hugo,’ she protested, looking at him with a suddenly thin and pale face, ‘it was because of you. What I can’t take from Gisi is how she treated you,’ and he did not know how to show his emotion so he took the napkin and wiped her chin on to which milk had trickled like a child’s.

  They never spoke of that episode again though it was the precursor of others. Kanti’s illness and death made her seem to lose control over herself and she became defiant. In the small room she moved to after settling a case brought against her by his sons, she seemed to get into perpetual rows with the neighbours. More than once the police had to come and intervene so that the neighbourhood brawl did not turn into a riot, a sequence of events only too common in Bombay, and Baumgartner was occasionally summoned as a mediator. ‘A memsahib using such language,’ the scandalised policemen told him, and he was ashamed. He became nervous of any involvement in Lotte’s affairs, wished he could keep to himself, but there was too long an association, too deeply ingrained a habit, and gradually, as she became drawn into her new neighbourhood and its own cast of characters and their affairs, violent and otherwise, the von Roths at least ceased to be a thorn in her side; she no longer felt any interest in them. The art gallery in the hotel lobby had closed down to make way for a boutique where silk scarves and sequinned purses were sold at greatly inflated prices to foreign tourists, and the von Roths ran their business from their own flat that Gala kept barred to all acquaintances from their past after the disgraceful affair of the drunken Lotte.

  ‘Hmff,’ sniffed Lotte after a very unsatisfactory conversation on the telephone that was all that Gala permitted her, ‘she doesn’t want us to see the flat is not so grand as she pretends. Julius is not doing so fine any longer. Indian painters have Indian patrons now – rich businessmen, industrialists – big men, not like my poor Kanti. They don’t want a European telling them what is good, what to buy, by now they have their own taste. So old Julius is finding business poor.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Baumgartner asked, genuinely curious.

  Lotte plucked her skirt over her knee. ‘She told me,’ she replied, ‘that Gisi.’ When Baumgartner looked dubious, she exploded, ‘What do you think? That we don’t talk together any more? After so many years, so much we have been through together? Who will she talk to if not old Lotte from Calcutta? Everyone thinks that she is so clever – but I know she is just an old goose.’

  Baumgartner felt too tired to dispute this. ‘Oh, they will find some way to live,’ he sighed. He had not been to the races since Chimanlal’s death, and he had last seen Julius in the street outside Akbarally’s, with a shopping bag about which he had seemed suddenly embarrassed, mumbling something about having to help Gala with a party she was giving that night. His clothes had looked frail, as during the years in camp; he still had his flossy hair carefully combed over his progressively balder scalp and looked more than ever like an old sheep. ‘Poor Gala,’ he piped, ‘the heat is so bad for her. You know she cannot stand the climate. Oh, Hugo, why did we not go back? We should have gone back long, long ago,’ he mourned, making Baumgartner want to snort, ‘Go back where? To what?’ But he did not – it was against the rules.

  ‘Of course they will somehow live,’ Lotte said. ‘You think our Lily will let him sit and do nothing – like you?’

  Nothing, then, was what life dwindled down to, but Baumgartner found he enjoyed that nothing more than he had enjoyed anything. Perhaps enjoyment was too strong a word for such mild pleasures as he now knew – watching his cats devour a bag of fish he had brought them, dozing with one of them on his lap for company, strolling down to Lotte’s for a drink – but they suited him. He felt his life blur, turn grey, like a curtain wrapping him in its dusty felt. If he became aware, from time to time, that the world beyond the curtain was growing steadily more crowded, more clamorous, and the lives of others more hectic, more chaotic, then he felt only relief that his had never been a part of the mainstream. Always, somehow, he had escaped the mainstream.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE BOY WAS very late.

  Baumgartner had cleared away the dinner, scraping the uneaten pish-pash into the cats’ plates, washing the dishes and putting them away. He himself had lost his appetite – if one left the eating too late, one found the appetite had dwindled and gone. Now he sat in his old cane chair by the door that opened on to the narrow balcony and looked at the racing papers of the week before. Although he had not been to the races since the day Chimanlal collapsed at the Turf Club, he still bought the racing papers from the urchins who swarmed around the cars waiting at traffic lights and peddled their wares at the top of their cockerel voices. To begin with he made a great show of cleaning his spectacles, adjusting them to his ears and nose, then studying last Sunday’s programme, running his finger along the list of names as though he were looking for prospective winners. But it was only an act, put on to show the cats he was a busy man with his own life, not entirely at their service. One came and lay across his feet, something he rarely did in such hot weather. Another stood by his knee, dug her claws into the material of his trousers, managed to inject their tips into his flesh, and then dropped away, visibly pleased at having left her mark. A third climbed on to the chair back and balanced there till he fell on to Baumgartner’s neck, then sprang off with a yowl and retired to the balcony. Baumgartner knew he was being summoned. Folding up the racing paper and putting it away with a show of reluctance, he went out on to the balcony that overlooked nothing but the narrow, enclosed lane and the blank wall on the other side.

  He never could make out why the builders had attached these ledge-like balconies to the walls of Hira Niwas. Other tenants used them to hang out their endless washing, but Baumgartner never had any washing to hang. Like the others, he stored his junk on them, old boxes and tins and empty bottles – and of course the sand trays for his cats. It made a playground for them when they felt active, and the way they climbed on to the boxes, or wound their way in and out of
the iron balustrade made him protest. ‘Now what if you fall, eh?’ and bent down to hold them away from such danger, at which they mocked.

  It was absolutely dark in the lane, the single lamppost having had no bulb for at least a year. People from the street sometimes came to urinate against the wall and rubbish drifted in and accumulated undisturbed. At the end of the lane, where it opened on to the street, Baumgartner could see streetlights shining on the family that lived on the pavement. They were unusually, probably only momentarily, quiet. He could see dark shapes crawling in and out of the low shack, and hear voices and the sounds of cooking and eating. Baumgartner could hear the hiss and splatter of oil, the eternal clinking of pots and pans in the flowing water of the gutter. In the darkness, so little illuminated by the dim lamp, it made a scene both melancholy and comforting. It was a scene that was linked for Baumgartner with the one he had observed through the barbed wire fencing of the camp – of women going to their cowpat heap to fetch dry pats for fuel, Annemarie hanging up the washing, and further back in time – his mother putting steaming dishes on the table, preparing him for bed . . .

  Yet only five minutes walk would bring one to the Taj Hotel, lit up and swinging with the life of money, business, trade, success; the stretch of Arthur Bunder Road and the waves of the sea battering the stone wall, the floodlit Gateway of India, the evening crowds strolling, eating spicy snacks at pavement stalls, sitting on the parapet and looking out at the lighted ships in the bay, waiting for night to bring a little cool with the sea breeze. The life of Bombay which had been Baumgartner’s life for thirty years now – or, rather, the setting for his life; he had never actually entered it, never quite captured it; damply, odorously, cacophonously palpable as it was, it had been elusive still.

  If he had earlier been grateful, now he was depressed. Fatigued, probably. Picking up Teufel under his arm, he went back into the room and shut the door. He looked at the clock on the shelf amongst all the tarnished trophies and saw it was late, very late. How long should he stay up and wait for the boy? Would he return at all? His rucksack lay on the floor beside the divan and so Baumgartner presumed he would return for it, but it could be tomorrow, or the day after. A boy like that, such a wild fellow, he could not be expected to bother about his belongings.

  Baumgartner sighed, and went down on his knees with a great groan to put the scattered belongings back into the rucksack and put it out of the way so that no one should stumble on it in the dark. He tried to pick up objects and shove them in without looking but if the objects were as extraordinary as syringes and phials then he could scarcely ignore them. His round, fat face looked furrowed as he handled the slim, sharp objects of glass and metal: they looked dangerous, they felt dangerous, he wished he did not have to touch them. Nervously he looked up to see if the boy would not burst in and accuse Baumgartner of – of what? What could old Baumgartner do with these things? They belonged to the young, they were a part of another generation’s existence, not his. He pushed them into the rucksack and buckled down the straps so they would not fall out again. Then he lifted the bag and leant it against the wall by the divan. Immediately Teufel, the most curious of the cats, slid across to it and began to examine it delicately, sniffing with his fine nostrils and shaking his whiskers at the peculiar, unaccustomed odours, then suddenly pouncing at it as though it was an interloper, a beast, digging his claws through the canvas ferociously, then falling away.

  Baumgartner laughed at his antics. ‘Ganz meshuggeh, du,’ he smiled, feeling much better, and went into the bathroom to change into his pyjamas.

  Coming out, he looked sadly towards the divan on which he always slept. Could he not go to sleep now that he was so tired and it was so late? Would the boy come tonight and demand to sleep here? Surely not. Baumgartner sat down and pressed his hand against his eyes which grew blurred and watered when he was tired. ‘Ach, Mieschen,’ he sighed to the soft grey one who came and rubbed her cold nose on his wrist, willing him to lie down so she could curl up on his chest, ‘we are not used to entertaining guests, eh? Not made for guests over here, eh?’ He rubbed the flat head between the two sharp ears, and she pushed hard against his hand in an ecstasy, purring in a way that acted as a soporific on Baumgartner.

  Finally he lay down on the divan – just for a little while, he told himself, and to keep himself awake he reached out for the packet of cards on the low table that he often read at odd hours of the night when he could not sleep. They were very old now, these cards, the paper brown and flecked and very brittle, but somehow the ink had lasted and he could still trace the writing on them with its cryptic messages: Do not worry, my rabbit, I am well. Are you well? Keep well, my mouse, and do not worry – I am well – and then they stopped. There were not many of them. Once again he had come to the end of the small collection. There were no more. After that – Nacht und Nebel. Night and Fog. Baumgartner put them carefully back on the low table, in a small pile where they always lay. Switching off the lamp, he lay with his arm over his eyes and in the dark could still see the script, spidery and fine. Gradually the words ran into each other, became garbled. They made no sense. Nothing made sense. Germany there, India here – India there, Gemany here. Impossible to capture, to hold, to read them, make sense of them. They all fell away from him, into an abyss. He saw them falling now, white shapes turning and turning, then going grey as the distance widened between them and him. He stood watching as they fell and floated, floated and fell, till they drifted out of sight, silently, and he was left on the edge, clutching his pyjamas, straining to look. But there was nothing to look at, it was all gone, and he shut his eyes, to receive the darkness that flooded in, poured in and filled the vacuum with the thick black ink of oblivion, of Nacht und Nebel.

  Kurt returned many hours later. The family on the pavement was asleep, lying wrapped in sheets that the darkness made white – all except for the drunkard Jagu himself who still had something in his bottle to finish and sat with it between his legs, his back against the lamppost. Kurt, seeing its glint, stopped. The man looked up at him, at the strange face, distinctly white, foreign. The shorts, the bracelet, the dishevelled hair marked him out as a type that had become known on the streets of the city. Hip-py they were called, the two syllables separated to make the scorn heavier.

  The two men regarded each other in the dark, the only two awake and alert at that hour. Kurt finally spoke, not expecting to be understood but knowing that there were certain words that everyone knew who belonged to the city, any city. ‘Ganja? Hashish?’ he asked, in a low and rasping tone because his throat was sore from wanting. ‘Grass? Brown sugar?’ He put out his hand to emphasise his want.

  The drunkard jerked into action. Lurching to his feet, he began to swear at Kurt, clutching his bottle and guarding the last drop fiercely from this hungry-looking firanghi.

  Kurt shook his head and spread out his hands to try and calm him. ‘No want, no want,’ he growled ‘Ganja? Grass? LSD?’ He made jabbing motions of one hand at the other.

  Jagu gesticulated more angrily, righteously even. The woman stirred in her shroud and muttered some angry words, trying to silence him. The man swung around to abuse her for interfering. Kurt left them to it and walked on.

  He went up the stairs into the hall of the brown stairs and the bright odours. The watchman was not on his stool; he had gone off either to relieve himself in the street or play a hand of cards with the other watchmen. The single unshaded bulb hanging by a dirt-encrusted cord shone with a wicked brilliance. Kurt went up the stairs heavily, grasping the sticky banisters to help him mount them, his legs having the curious sensation of giving way under him, his feet of slipping in different directions. He panted laboriously, his breath coming with difficulty as he mounted the first, second and then the third flight of the old rotten wooden stairs. On every landing, a closed door, a steamy silence. It was very late.

  On the third landing there was no light, the bulb having fused and not been replaced, but some light from the hal
l below filtered up and Kurt peered at the small handwritten label pasted on the door. H. Baumgartner. The name made his mouth twist with sarcasm, with ferocity. To come half-way across the world and meet H. Baumgartner, what an irony. Then he bunched his lips together and paused as he got a small penknife out of his pocket and inserted it into the keyhole. Sven, in Kathmandu, had taught him the trick – if the knife had a sharp enough point, and was pressed and turned in a certain way, it could open almost any lock, but it had to be sharp and fine enough to enter the lock at a certain point: was it? Kurt tried to control his large hands that seemed clumsy tonight, as difficult to bring under control as his legs and feet – like them, his hands seemed colossal, weighty and with a will of their own. But he managed – it was a trick he had used so often after all; he gave a snort of laughter, thinking of Sven, of Kathmandu, of Freak Street, of ganja, the smell of it, the dry, leafy, clinging smoke and sweetness. He put his tongue out between his teeth as he tasted it, and tested the lock. With scarcely any effort, just a wish, it sprang open. There was a click and Kurt heard a sound in the flat responding to that click, but only a very soft sound, very light, quickly fading. Baumgartner’s cursed cats of course, he thought, and swore. Pressing the door open a slit, he peered in. After the shadowiness of the landing, it did not seem impenetrably dark – some light from the street came through the open window. In that light he saw the sliding, slinking shapes of the felines as they raised themselves or lowered themselves to examine the visitor. He restrained his impulse to lash out at them with his bare feet.

  He stood for a while in the doorway, staring into the darkness and the dusky shapes, the moving ones and the immobile ones, familiarising himself with it all before he took his next step. His rucksack was gone from the rug, he saw, and also made out Baumgartner’s thick, lumpy shape on the divan, limp with deep sleep. He turned his head very slowly and made sure that the silver prizes on the shelf were still there. There was little light to see by, but he could make out their sizes, their shapes, their number. He slid his penknife back in his pocket and shut the door behind him, so silently that the shape on the divan did not stir.